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Beer for Breakfast on Flora Day

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At a little before 7 a.m., as the first dance nears the centre of Helston, its arrival heralded by the brass and drums of the town band, we see our first pints of Spingo Middle. They’re in plastic glasses and the man and woman drinking them look like they need strong coffee rather than beer, but that’s not what today is all about.

We hit the Blue Anchor at not much after 8:30 a.m. and find it busy already. Breakfasts are being served to the small army of temporary staff and to tourists. Some lads from up north nurse their pints, making macho noises but slyly nursing their pints, not wanting to fall by the wayside too early in the day. Some older local men, experienced drinkers, aren’t being remotely cautious. This is, after all, Helston’s great debauch — bigger than Christmas and New Year put together. We don’t, in all honesty, enjoy our pints. Our mouths taste of coffee and toothpaste and we end up feeling slightly queasy.

Back outside, with the seemingly never-ending children’s dance underway, we notice the crowd parting, not for a top-hatted local VIP, but for a pin of Spingo — a blue-striped metal cask — being wheeled from the Blue Anchor to a private party somewhere in the back streets by two grinning men who look like they’ve won the lottery.

It’s not all Spingo. Youngsters sitting on walls and first-floor windowsills neck Budweiser, Corona and Magner’s cider. Before long, every alleyway we cut down is scattered with empty bottles and cans. Wedges of lime squish under our feet. Through back garden gates, we catch glimpses of parties where everyone is holding a glass of wine or a small green bottle of French supermarket lager.

By the evening, as we return to the Blue Anchor for a last pint before the bus ride home, we find a huge bouncer in attendance. Physically intimidating, yes, but his manners are impeccable, and he shows great diplomacy in steering one drunk after another out of the pub and pointing them back towards their houses to sleep it off. They keep coming, the happy inebriates, walking imaginary tightropes, chuckling to themselves, hands on the walls for support. A glass smashes and we tense momentarily, but there are apologies and laughter, and the guv’nor, whose pub has been heaving for twelve hours, clears it up with a huge smile on his face.

This last pint of Spingo is not the best we’ve ever had — it’s a little warm and rather buttery, an inevitable result of upping production for the Big Day, perhaps — but it’s a pleasure just to be there amid the warm glow of a community at play.

Ten More Long Articles on Beer

A horse-drawn brewer's dray loaded with beer barrels.

As the beer blogs enter their Christmas hibernation, and you find yourself on a long journey home, or twiddling your thumbs on the sofa, novelty hat askew, it’s a great time to catch-up on some of those longer pieces you might have missed. Here are ten we bookmarked.

1. The Plot to Destroy America’s Beer (Bloomberg) — this article got tweeted and retweeted by everyone on earth in October but we didn’t get round to reading it until now. Lesson: monopolies threaten choice and quality for ‘ordinary drinkers’ of ‘normal beer’.

2. The History of Pilsner Urquell in Three Parts (Evan Rail) — the Why Beer Matters author tells the story of the founding of Pilsner Urquell, analyses its founding document and then sets straight various myths, fairy tales and downright lies that have built up over the years.

3. Shades, Dives and other varieties of British bar (Martyn Cornell) — ever wondered about the difference between the saloon, lounge, snug and public bar? This article will sort you out. (Or confuse you further by throwing in the vaults, the shades, the ladies’ bar…)

4. Terror at the Wenlock Brewery (Stephen Sadler) — on 11 September, 1940, hundreds of people sought shelter from a German air raid in the basement of a London brewery, with dreadful consequences.

5. Shakespeare’s Local and the Austrian Tyrant (Pete Brown) — a handy leftover bit of his latest book, this piece tells the story of how Southwak brewery workers kicked a war criminal’s butt in 1850.

6. Albany Ale: Going Dutch (Craig) — one of several posts by this blogger on the history of Dutch brewers in Albany in the state of New York.

7. Complete Guide to All-grain Brewing(Neil at MashSpargeBoil) — he makes it sound so easy! (Which it kind of is.) If brewing is one of your 2013 resolutions, read this for encouragement and advice.

8. Yeast ploys…(Charles Bamforth) — brewing scientist Charles Bamforth argues that yeast isn’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to pinning down a specific character in brewing. (Contrarian much?)

9. Oxidation: good beer gone bad (Chris Bible) — a slightly dry but very clear piece explaining (a) what oxidation is; (b) how to spot it in your beer; and (c) how to prevent it.

10. History of Ignatz Bier(Homebaseproject) — the story of a Jewish-owned brewery in Berlin from 1907-2011, including it’s ‘Aryanization’ in 1933.

BONUS: The Pubs of Old London(Spitalfields Life) — not many words in this one so not especially suitable for ‘reading later’, but the pictures…. oh, boy, such pictures!

If you’re still hungry for more, our previous ‘longreads’ lists are here and here

We recommend Pocket (formerly Read it Later) for iOS and Android as a great way to consume long web articles on the move.

Designer beer, session beer and Chimay

Chimay beer in a glass.

Here are some bits and pieces we spotted around and about in the last few days.

1. We think we’ve worked out when Trappist beer first landed in the UK. A chain of off-licences called Arthur Rackham began importing Chimay (probably Rouge) in 1974, perhaps in the wake of the 1974 World Beer Festival at Olympia in London. It first showed up at the CAMRA Great British Beer Festival in 1979. Anyone know otherwise?

2. Here’s another definition of session beer for you to chew on, from Tim Webb and Joris Pattyn’s 10o Belgian Beers to Try Before You Die:

Surprisingly, it makes a great session beer. Just as you think its bitterness will be too much, it proves it can tempt you to one more.

Beer you want to drink a lot of rather than beer it’s easy to drink in quantity… that’s a thought.

3. We’d forgotten the term ‘designer beer‘ until we came across a 1991 Daily Mirror article on the then hot trend in ‘boozy fashion accessories’. Typical designer beers, it suggests, are Brahma (favoured by Andrew Ridgeley of Wham!), Dos Equis (David Bowie), Sapporo (Jason Donovan) and Peroni (Tina Turner). Chimay Blue also gets a mention, alongside a peach beer from Belgium which was supposed to have aphrodisiac qualities.

Old recipes, etiquette and wallop

1912 St Austell Stout

Being some notes and queries on subjects diverse.

Even more beers brewed to historic recipes

About this time last year, we tried to compile a reasonably complete list of beers being brewed to historic recipes. Now we note that one of the beers in the Sainsbury’s beer hunt is J.W. Lees Manchester Star, supposedly brewed to an 1884 porter recipe, and also hear news of a St Austell 1913 stout. (We’ve seen a recipe in their books from 1912, pictured.) The latest Fuller’s Past Masters beer, 1931 Burton Extra, has just been released. This summer also saw Camden brew a 1908 pale ale which was very tasty, but seemed (too us) rather too far from the original spec to really deserve the ‘historic’ tag.

Questions of pub etiquette

Maxwell asked this question on Twitter last night:

It’s a good question. Our feeling was that, if you need to ask, then you’re not eligible, but can anyone give a more helpful answer?

The meaning of ‘wallop’

Watching the BFI’s Roll out the Barrel DVD again the other night, we particularly enjoyed Down at the Local (1945), a propaganda short made for British troops serving overseas. It was designed to remind them of home, and of why they were fighting, and shows scenes of pubs in London, Lancashire and Somerset. In London, the narrators decide on mild and so ask the barmaid for ‘two pints of wallop‘. In Preston, incidentally, they decide on bitter and mild and so order ‘mixed’.

A second talk at Eden

The Boak and Bailey edutainment roadshow was at the Eden Project again last weekend. There was no Oakham Green Devil  IPA to demonstrate with this time, though, as it all got pilfered from a store cupboard. They left behind the St Austell HSD and Franziskaner.

 

Beer flavours we’ve sussed

Pints of beer at the Blue Anchor, Helston

Though we still struggle to confidently identify specific hop varieties, we have, we think, learned in the last year or so to spot a couple of specific flavours in beer.

First, there’s an acidic, bile-like tang that we’re pretty comes from an overdose of black malt in an otherwise relatively pale beer. It’s not especially nice — like a trailer for the indigestion yet to come. John Smith’s has it.

Secondly, there’s the taste of Nottingham yeast. In the wake of our yeast epiphany, we’ve become ultra sensitive to its effects. Nottingham is a fairly neutral strain and leaves, for want of a better phrase, a kind of ‘dusty hole’ (fnaar) in the flavour of the beer. It’s not exactly unpleasant but any beer brewed with it, we’re beginning to think, needs the hop and malt channels turned up louder to compensate.

It helps that, increasingly, brewers are open and honest about their ingredients and processes, giving us the opportunity to test our guesswork.

Next to pin down: a suspicion that we might be able to guess, with a bit more practice, whether a given British ale is brewed with soft water. Our water in Penzance is extremely soft and the beer we brew here, on the same kit, tastes quite different to the stuff we were making in London. There’s a certain sweetness in it now, regardless of how many hops we throw in.

Perspective Check

It can be odd but good for us to spend time with people who aren’t obsessive about beer.

Our guest this weekend speaks her mind and knows a lot about books, music, history, theology, food and, yes, wine… but nothing whatsoever about beer.

She was keen to taste every beer we drank, finding most of them ‘interesting’ or ‘nice’. Anything dark she thought was like Guinness. And that was the extent of her ‘engagement’ with the stuff in the glass.

How could she not be blown away by Westmalle Triple? Or Fuller’s Vintage Ale? Nice but boozy. Nice!? With her enquiring mind, how could she not at least be intrigued by the flavours, the hints of this and aromas of that? Well, she wasn’t, and our bafflement is our problem, not hers.

We ought to understand it. We’re exactly the same about wine — we’ll drink it, but with a shrug, and without passing comment or judgement. It just does nothing for us. We’re as interested in wine as in, say, envelopes.

Some people are beer geeks; others are beer drinkers; but, for a large number of people, beer might as well not exist. It’s important for us to occasionally emerge from our cave, blinking and smelling of hops, to be reminded of that.

We went for a run from Penzance to Mousehole in a gale yesterday. No bottle of Fuller’s Vintage has never tasted better, nor any fire felt warmer, than those we enjoyed on our return.

Memorable Beers #14 — Guinness With Nick

By Bailey.

The only reason I started drinking was because of peer pressure from my mate Nick. I stayed at university for an extra year to do a masters and he had another year of his engineering degree to go and. Early on, the full horror dawned on him: “I can’t believe I’m stuck in this miserable city with only a teetotaller for company.”

I started drinking to keep him company and soon learned that Nick had a set of rules about pubs and beer:

1. Pubs should be dark brown up to waist height and nicotine brown above.

2. Red Stripe is the go-to beer for most situations, but especially nightclubs and picnics.

3. Beck’s tastes of blood.

4. Stella gives you headaches because it is “dirty”.

5. No-one likes Guinness, but you have to drink it on Sunday lunchtime — “It’s a rule.”

Having only been drinking for about two months, I remember vividly being bullied into getting a pint of Guinness and taking two hours to drink it. It only got worse as, sitting next to a roaring fire, it got warmer and warmer. I’d never tasted anything so bitter or so vile.

I was not reassured by Nick’s Sixth Law:

6. Guinness makes you shit treacle.

These days, of course, Nick is himself teetotal, and I’ve got way more rules about beer and pubs than he ever did.

Hunting for Burtons

For the second time this week, we find ourselves thinking about Burton Ale, a type of beer that doesn’t exist, at least according to some taxonomies.

We didn’t like McEwan’s Champion when we tried it at the weekend. Martyn Cornell suggested that this might be because Burton is an acquired taste; if it wasn’t, it might not have disappeared from the British drinkers consciousness so rapidly and completely after World War II.

We want to test that theory by finding and drinking some. As step one in that mission, we need a list of currently available beers that might qualify. (Few are described as such on the label or pumpclip.) Here’s a first, very short attempt, awaiting your additions and corrections.

  • Young’s Winter Warmer (5%)
  • Bristol Beer Factory Exhibition (5.2%, based on a recipe from the defunct Smiles brewery)
  • Fuller’s Past Masters XX (7.5%) and 1845. (We already know these well.)
  • Old Dairy Brewery Snow Top (6%)
  • Blue Anchor Spingo Special (6.5% — “Dark in colour and sweet in taste”) and Extra Special (7.5%)
  • And McEwan’s Champion, of course.

UPDATE 06/03/2012 — suggested by commenters

  • Marston’s Owd Roger (7.6%)
  • J.W. Lees Moonraker (7.5%)
  • Porterhouse Brainblásta (7%)

That’s not a very long list. Are there are any specific Old Ales which are really/also Burtons? Are any of Harvey’s huge range of beers Burton-like? We are eyeing their Christmas and Elizabethan Ales with suspicion.

Of course, thinking about it, we might have more luck hunting Burtons when the season opens in the autumn...